Thursday, 19 December 2013

Replacing teachers with computers: the profit motive

by Richard Hatcher

Running schools is not the only way to make profits out of
schools. The other way is to turn teaching into an online commodity. Not just
changing the structure and governance of the school system so that in future
state-funded schools can be run for profit, but changing its labour process.

The transformation of schooling in England into a profitable
market through online teaching and learning is also the ambition of other
global players, including Pearson, the largest education company in the world, and
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation.

Murdoch has embarked on what he calls a "revolutionary
and profitable" move by his media companies into online education. In
2010, News Corporation paid $360 million for a 90 percent stake in Wireless
Generation, a company based in Brooklyn that specialises in education software,
data systems and assessment tools. Also in 2010 he hired Joel Klein, New York
City schools chancellor, as an executive vice president at News Corporation to
oversee the company’s new online educational ventures. Klein’s policy for New
York schools focused on academy-style charter schools and developing a uniform
citywide curriculum, both ideal preparation for entry into Gove’s school system. Gove of course would be a key figure in any
attempt to penetrate the British schools market. The Leveson inquiry revealed
that Gove meets Murdoch frequently (Gove used to be a leader writer on the
Times) and is an enthusiastic backer of the ideas of Joel Klein.

In January 2011 Joel Klein visited the UK as the guest of
the DfE. In June 2011 Murdoch and Klein both spoke at ‘The Times CEO summit’.
Klein called for all pupils to be provided with tablet computers, adding that
he would be "thrilled" if 10 per cent of News Corp's revenues came
from education in the next five years. The Times (June 22 2011) reported the
meeting under the headline ‘Education must join the digital age, says Murdoch’.
It reported that ‘Rupert Murdoch signalled a digital revolution in education
yesterday, saying that News Corporation would help to lead the change in how
children are taught by becoming one of the world’s largest providers of
educational material in the next five years.’

On 26 June 2011 Gove was at yet another dinner with Murdoch.
Three days later he gave the most explicit endorsement to date of News Corp's
education project in an address to the Royal Society entitled Technology in the
Classroom. He said: "We need to change curricula, tests and teaching to
keep up with technology … Whitehall must enable these innovations but not seek
to micromanage them. The new environment of teaching schools will be a fertile
ecosystem for experimenting and spreading successful ideas rapidly through the
system." (29 June 2011)

At the beginning of 2013 Rachel Wolf, who had been appointed
by Gove as director of the New Schools Network, whose function was to help set
up free schools, took up a new job in New York with News Corp's newly launched
education division Amplify, whose chief executive is Joel Klein.

The direction of travel is clear. But transforming the
pedagogy of the English school system, its labour process, into - at least in
part - online education that can make profits - and not just profits but a
higher rate of profit than big international companies can make by investing elsewhere
- is a massive and uncertain task. The foundations, the preconditions, have to
be put into place. And under Gove they already are.

The biggest cost is salaries of teachers. For schools to be
able to afford to buy online teaching they would need to significantly reduce
the number of qualified teachers. But online-based education doesn’t need
qualified teachers. Gove has opened the door by allowing free schools to employ
unqualified staff. The Observer reported on 10 March 2013 that one in ten free
school teachers are unqualified.

Secondly, online education is a transmission model of
teaching with a standardised curriculum (even if progress through it is
individualised). This model is well suited to Gove’s so-called knowledge-based
curriculum, drawing on the model of US educationist E D Hirsch. Thirdly, the
power of the teachers’ unions to resist these changes has to be broken, so
academies aren’t bound by national pay and conditions, and government is in the
process of scrapping these for all schools. And finally teacher training has to
produce new teachers with the right culture, and the best place for that is
schools already operating with that culture, into which trainee teachers can be
assimilated, not university departments where dominant ideologies can be
questioned.

Of course, transforming the labour process of teaching into
an online commodity for profit is a massive challenge. There is a huge weight
of inertia in the system, and there is the risk of both professional and public
opposition and resistance. But it is also the case that online teaching can be
a powerful resource for teachers and pupils, and it can be developed without
the need for profit-hungry private companies.

(Extract from a chapter in Revolution, and Why, and Where Heading? – Review of Gove’s School
Revolution Scrutinised, a pamphlet
from the Socialist Education Association June 2013).

1 comment:

And yet, as our leaders push us towards an increasingly outdated and outmoded 'Industrial Age' concept of education in which 'knowledge' is 'content', the K-12 (as well as FE & HE) education sector(s), in support of market demand, are already driving an 'education as learning how to be able to do' agenda in support of the Information Age and a Knowledge Economy. Time to start shaping for the future not clinging to the past. A future in which qualified and capable professionally qualified educators (i.e. teachers!) will be best able to facilitate and support the development of a functionality literate and highly capable citizenry. Isn't it?